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AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns
angry tapir writes "Advanced Micro Devices has announced that Dirk Meyer has resigned from the post of CEO, and that the company is beginning to search for a new chief executive. Meyer resigned in a mutual agreement with the board of directors, and the company has appointed Thomas Seifert, the company's chief financial officer, as the interim CEO. Meyer was installed as CEO in 2008 as a replacement to Hector Ruiz, just as the company was making its way out of rough financial times. In October, AMD posted a third-quarter net loss of US$118 million."
I for one an sorry to see him go. I think he has brought the company well through some rough times.
Some CEO's that are great for riding through the rough times aren't the CEO's that you want when that stretch is over.
They're in a price war with a competitor who is a generation ahead of them in manufacturing technology. Their margins are getting slimmer and slimmer.
Actually, that's typically how it's handled when the CEO makes an abrupt departure, one of the other executive board members will step in while they find a replacement.
Personally, I don't blame him, I blame it on Intel and its successful attempts to bribe major equipment integrators to not use AMD chips.
I'll agree with this. AMD's been seeing some triumphs lately- their graphics division has been very successful, even despite a minor delay with the Radeon HD6900 GPU. Nvidia might have the performance crown this generation, but their previous generation has been shaky and their 40nm chips haven't been as available as AMD's, allowing AMD to gain considerable marketshare.
I've noticed a few netbooks with AMD Bobcat cores appear at CES, and has enough performance and power efficiency to give both Atom and Ion some serious competition.
While Llano doesn't appeal to me personally, it's nice to see Fusion reaching the desktop shortly. I'm also anxious to see how the Bulldozer will perform once it's released in a few months.
With the delay of Intel's Ivy Bridge into 2012, AMD has a lot of potential to make this year a profitable one.
Sigs are for losers
I'm just getting going on GPU programming. I was thinking to go with OpenCL (pushed by AMD/ATI ) over CUDA (pushed by nVidia) because I thought AMD looked more likely to survive in the long term. But now it's getting harder to tell which company is safer to rely upon.
OpenCL works on both AMD and nVidia GPUs , so you should be safe there.
Intel has also promised OpenCL support on Sandy Bridge and later integrated GPUs. Not to mention S3 and VIA support.
I predict that Cuda will quickly become irrelevant and die a long, slow death (ie- just legacy support, no new features). Much like Cg did, after GLSL and HLSL matured. No one wants to be stuck on a single hardware platform, despite performance advantages.
Sigs are for losers
No amount of bribes in the world can account for the fact that Intel's latest processors have been significantly outperforming AMD's for the last few years now.
Yet AMDs significantly outperformed Intels for quite a few years.. but only managed 50% market share at its height because of Intels illegal (no "questionable" about it) practices.
"His name was James Damore."
so the guy that brought AMD to a position where they're successfully launching 3 products in one year (which they've never done before) is not someone you want to keep around? Are you kidding?
Are you honestly asking this question? If you are going to pretend to know anything about the business world, then you should at least pretend to also know that some CEO's are specialists at bringing companies out of financial trouble and even bankruptcy.
For example (from my industry) there is Scott Butera, a CEO that has brought more than one casino out of financial trouble, who has just been picked up by the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut because of its very serious financial troubles (billions in debt, defaulting on loans..)
Often what these specialists bring to the table is their trusted contacts in the financial industries. The primary goal is often to maintain a credit line while the problems are resolved (because no large business can run without credit, regardless of how much cash they have.)
"His name was James Damore."
It's unfortunate, but regardless, I will be a die hard AMD supporter. They've helped keep the market competitive, have much better business practices, and always have the end-user in mind with regards to their CPU socket configurations. Or should I say configuration? One socket for a massive range of CPUs. I like being in control of my upgrades. I can't stand that Intel changes MB socket types with damn near every CPU and expect it to be alright to fork over a couple hundred bucks in addition to the CPU price. AMD has never let me down since I switched during the K7 era. I for one can not wait for the Bulldozer. I know right now the new Sandy Bridge chip is simply amazing but I can wait a few months.
Just to add to this..
..the predecessor to DirectCompute was a little .NET library that came out of Microsoft Research called Accelerator which was initially available to the public in 2006.
..thats several years before CUDA (2008) and OpenCL (also 2008)
Microsoft has actually been the innovator on this one.
"His name was James Damore."
What does volume matter if you don't have margins?
1. Intel has always been ahead on processing tech, often a generation in front or if not on a more mature process. That means AMD has bigger dies and lower yields, which directly inflate cost.
2. A lot of the expense is R&D, and with Intel having ~80% of the microprocessor market each AMD chip has to carry at least four times as much of the cost as each Intel chip.
3. Intel got a processor to match every one of AMDs, the reverse is not true. Intel makes high margins where they are alone and squeezes AMDs margin where they compete.
Seriously, take a look at something like 3D rendering performance, which is usually extremely multi-threading friendly. The 2500K which sells for less than the 1100T is beating it in everything but the POV-ray test. Never mind that it's much faster and better for everything that doesn't take advantage of six cores. The Opteron vs Xeon battle looks the same, AMD had the advantage a while but they're struggling badly now there too. On the low end Intel has the Atom which is raking in money meaning AMD is losing a lot of low-end sales. They're boxed in and in every market they deliver "value" processors. That means in other words low income processors. So with low income and high costs, you post a loss.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're forgetting that AMD has a very comfortable performance lead at the very high end
Yes, those are AMD 48-core system at #1... and #2... and #3
Then there is the old performance per dollar metric where AMD has the top 7 chips on the market right now.
Intel definitely has some good chips, but aside from a small group of them, they are terrible value (rip off) and also not something they are selling a whole lot of (if you are throwing down $1000 for the CPU, you are probably in the market for a server chip with significantly better memory bandwidth than that i7-980 offers)
"His name was James Damore."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This article explains: Coup at AMD: Why was Dirk Meyer Pushed Out? Quote:
"Remember, Dirk Meyer's three deadly sins were:
1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late.
"2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.
"3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom."
There is a comment at the bottom of this poor-quality article in the Inquirer that says Dirk Meyer "was the lead engineer who designed the Athlon, Opteron and the DEC Alpha. Let's not forget that from 1999-2006, AMD actually had better processors than Intel, and this was due to Dirk Meyer's technology."
As someone who was able to compare salaries when AMD bought ATI, I've got to take issue with that comment... AMD actually paid *very* handsomely compared to ATI (and that pay disparity still exists, and causes some resentment... but that's a separate issue). And of course, there are tons of highly competent, skilled, and creative engineers still in the company.
A lot of "top" ex-ATI talent has gone elsewhere (also starts with 'A'), but that phenomenon is almost exclusively limited to Silicon Valley. In general, the hop from job-to-job culture is far less practical when there are only a handful of ASIC jobs to be had in certain areas. Many "top" CPU guys are still around too, so far as I can tell (not my department).
The thing that I notice from all of these moves is that ex-ATI people are on the move upwards, largely displacing the CPU side. The poor execution of the latter group is a large part of that, no question. The trouble is, most of the moves upwards are being made by people in (you guessed it), Silicon Valley. The headquarters is still in Austin, but it's becoming little San Fransisco. The reason this is a problem? Well, it's building resentment in almost the entire remainder of the company, which is a rather large organization. The CPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under formerly-graphics ownership (add that to the irritated sentiment that AMD overpaid for ATI...), and two-thirds of the GPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under Silicon Valley ownership. Some changes are viewed as being unfair (such is life) and some are clearly undeserved (ATI had some big screw-ups too). The politics is actually pretty bad; it's much worse than any other place I've ever worked.
We've got a group meeting about this announcement this afternoon. I wonder what the spin will be...
captcha: tantrum
haha...